Thursday, 28 February 2008

If you like Voynich-themed short stories, there's most of one posted on the Analog website here. It's called "Guaranteed Not To Turn Pink In The Can", by Thomas R. Dulski: I mentioned it here a few days ago. Of course, the extract stops just at the point the story starts getting interesting, to try to get you to buy a copy of the April 2008 issue (where it appears in full): but that's fair enough, I suppose.

Voynichologically, a few minor typos ("Athansius", "Kirchner", "Baresche", etc), but it's basically all there. Yet to my jaded eyes it reads like a brandname-laden faux-noir short story and a Wikipedia article whose pages have all been shuffled together, not unlike Herbal A and Herbal B.

Turning the whole Big Jim/UFO/Voynich link on its head (as the remainder of the story undoubtedly does) is a nice idea: but writing Voynich fiction is a desperately hard balancing act, and I can't help but feel the attempt to shoehorn plot and history into a short story needs a lighter touch than this.